The Flexible Dynamics of the Intellectual Property Regime to Deal with Health Emergencies: Case Studies from Aids and Covid-19

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that intellectual property rights become flexible enough to expand the supply of medicines and vaccines, in addition to enabling development and innovation. In order to understand this dynamic, we started with a systematic literature review, with the object of analyzing three case studies in which the performance of different international and national actors is observed. The first deals with the legislative actions in the country, which made possible the decree of the compulsory license of the Efavirenz patent, by the Executive Power in 2007, during the sanitary crisis of AIDS. The second demonstrates that the Covid-19 pandemic was strong enough to spur vaccine innovation and development; but it still has problems with production capacity, whose solution proposed at the World Trade Organization (WTO) was the waiver of patents. Finally, the Brazilian Judiciary, in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, made the Intellectual Property Law more flexible, by removing the sole paragraph of art. 40 of the Law of Intellectual Property (LPI), in Direct Action of Unconstitutionality (ADI) 5,529, and the Power promoted several changes in the LPI, to face the crisis. It is concluded that the dynamics of the norms that govern Intellectual Property Law allow for different possibilities of flexibility, depending on each concrete problem, to function as a kind of “emergency intellectual property right”.